Working Smarter : PowerPoint

Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Our good friend and WSN partner Rick Altman has authored a Working Smarter eCourse for us entitled “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation,” which you can sign up for by clicking here. This is the first lesson of his eCourse, entitled “Too Much Too Easy.”

First are the dues to pay. As a good friend and messaging guru Jim Endicott like to remind us, good storytelling is often about first identifying the pain. And as tennis great

Martina Navratilova once said to me personally, “No pain...no gain.”

She was talking about physical fitness, not creating slides, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to name drop...

The 30-Minute Syndrome

If only I could earn the proverbial nickel for every time I have heard the following:

“PowerPoint is easy. I learned it in less than half an hour.”

Let’s start by acknowledging that the statement is generally true: PowerPoint® is not difficult to pick up and begin using. Both of my daughters created slides for school projects before the age of 10, and indeed, a reasonably astute grownup can begin making slides within 30 minutes.

Microsoft® might have you believe that this is a virtue of the software. In fact, it is bad. It is very, very bad.

Creating a presentation can be an extraordinarily creative experience, but it rarely starts out that way. And that is because PowerPoint’s default settings are not very creative and because most PowerPoint users do not come to the software from a creative field. They start out elsewhere in the Office® suite. They are Excel® crunchers, Outlook® gurus, Access® junkies. When they encounter PowerPoint and discover that they can begin using the program with effect in less than an hour, they are like kids with new toys.

But again, this is not a good thing; it’s a bad thing. These people declare themselves proficient after their requisite 30 minutes. These same people who get really good at their 30-minute skill set call themselves advanced. And those who get really fast at these same skills call themselves gurus. Those who teach it to others are gods.

But they don’t get beyond those first 30 minutes of skills. And then they go forth and commit high crimes against innocent businesspeople everywhere. Yup...Death by PowerPoint.

With PowerPoint, you practice your craft in public, and this craft is forever linked with death and taxes as the three things humans fear most. This is much more than the converted Excel user bargained for. It’s possible, make that likely, that she had no experience at all speaking before a group; she simply taught herself how to make bullet slides.

And herein lies the biggest disconnect of all. The company that this innocent Excel-***-PowerPoint user works for might spend millions of dollars on its brand. Expensive design firms to create glossy brochures...P.R. firms with lots of names on their door, hired to spin messages...high-powered marketing firms to ensure maximum exposure.

And this same company then sends someone out with 30 minutes of proficiency to make what will likely be a company’s first impression: the presentation in a boardroom.

Companies have simply not made enough of an effort to identify, define, and cultivate the role of the presentation professional. Therefore, it usually is assigned in haphazard fashion to anyone willing to step up to the plate, including the person who is simply good with Microsoft Office.

The Cram-Everything-In Obsession

I recently watched an episode of The Apprentice, where a handsome, well-dressed twenty-something man pleaded his case to Donald Trump by reciting every business slogan he could possibly think of, as fast as he possibly could, interspersed with the robotic “I’ll be great for your organization, Mr. Trump” at every breath. And it worked: Trump fired the other guy.

This is a very real phenomenon in today’s culture—the sense that it’s better to say everything than risk forgetting to say the one thing that you really need to say. And nowhere is this more evident than in the typical slides that project onto the whiteboards and white screens of America today.

This plays out in a fairly predictable way by those who prepare their own slides for a presentation:

They sit down at their desk.
They open PowerPoint.
They start thinking of every point that they need to make.
Soon they start thinking of how they are going to make each point.

End result: they have written a speech.

This is not such a bad proposition for the uninitiated public speaker; as we all know, it’s a horrible proposition for her audience. The woman from Scottsdale Arizona probably thought she was on the right track when she perpetrated the slide below:

It said everything she wanted to say.

No question about it: one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. In many cases, it is because they have no idea that the Notes view exists.

This leads to Universal Axioms No.1:

If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.

Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. Talk about your double-whammy, because Universal Axiom No. 1 leads directly into Universal Axiom No. 2:

When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

The slide shown above is the result of a five-minute makeover. We did nothing more than parse out the main ideas and add a rule. If you take 10 seconds, you’ll get the gist of what this presentation is about, but you probably would not have invested even one second trying to sift through the original slide. More important, we might stand a chance of hearing the real person come out if she speaks to this slide, as opposed to the drone who would have read the first slide. Gone is the compulsion to recite the slide verbatim; now she’ll have to actually collect her thoughts and deliver them. Scary? Perhaps at first. But the five-minute slide makeover will also make her over into a better presenter.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, more pain in lesson 2...

If you liked what you’ve read thus far, then click here sign up for Rick Altman’s eCourse “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation.”

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Three Ways SmartDraw 2009 Can Make Presenting Easier for You

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:24:00 GMT

Given that we just published a free eCourse all about creating presentations with captivating introductions, I think now is a good time to remind some of our readers about all of the cool ways that SmartDraw can make life easier for the average businessperson. Most of us are not regular presenters—perhaps a few times a year we have to present a proposal, report, marketing piece or training seminar.

I certainly fall into that class of presenter and I suspect that most of our readers do also; fortunately, our product, SmartDraw, can make life a lot easier for average presenters like you and me. Here’s how:

Plan Your Content Using Storyboard Templates

The key to having a good presentation is having your material organized in a logical, coherent fashion. Storyboards are an effective way of achieving this type of organization quickly, easily and efficiently.

If you want a refresher on why it’s a good idea to use storyboarding when you’re planning a presentation, check out this earlier post I wrote entitled “Having Trouble Putting a Presentation Together? Try Storyboarding.”

In SmartDraw 2009, you begin by opening up a new instance of SmartDraw and select the “Storyboards” template from the SmartTemplate Selector on the left.

Then you click on the blank storyboard template.

Add new boxes for each main topic. If I’m presenting a new project proposal presentation, I might want to build six slides explaining:

Who is responsible?
What are we doing?
When is this due?
Where are we allocating resources?
Why is this important?
How do we do this?

So I will go ahead and place that onto my storyboard.

And then add the topic-specific details beneath the box of each topic.

And from here, I have a good, rough outline of my entire PowerPoint® presentation. In fact, here’s what this outline would look like in PowerPoint® 2007’s “Outline View:”

Export any Diagram or Chart to PowerPoint® Easily

One of the most popular features that SmartDraw has had over the past several versions is its interoperability with Excel®, Word® and PowerPoint®. With the touch of a single button, you can export any diagram, whether it’s a flowchart, a floor plan, or anything else directly to Microsoft Office®.

To export from SmartDraw to PowerPoint®, simply open up your diagram in SmartDraw.

Click on the “PPT” button on the Quick Access Toolbar.

And then your diagram will appear in your current instance of PowerPoint®. Or if you don’t have a running instance of PowerPoint®, SmartDraw will start one for you.

And that’s it!

Animate Your Charts and Diagrams in SmartDraw for More Effective Deliveries

If you’d like to have even more control over how you deliver your SmartDraw diagrams during a PowerPoint® presentation, you can pre-animate them directly within SmartDraw 2009 before you export them! Here’s a two minute video which explains how you can sequence any diagram in PowerPoint using SmartDraw:

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

And that’s it. This is the last planned blog entry for 2008, so I hope you’ve enjoyed reading! We’ve got a lot planned for 2009 already so we’ll have plenty of great content ready for you when you all return home from the holidays. Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays!

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Presentations are not Limited to PowerPoint®

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:54:00 GMT

PowerPoint® is great – it’s probably the easiest tool for cranking out presentations, regardless of purpose. However, I think it’s worth mentioning that PowerPoint® isn’t the end-all, be-all of presentations.

Allow me to share a relevant anecdote: in my final semester of college I was involved in a behavioral sciences class and each week two groups of students had to give presentations to the class on some of the subject matter. The professor made it clear that each presentation had to be more than just a recitation of the material covered in the class and that there had to be some degree of observable interactivity between the presenters and the audience. He also made one point in particular especially clear: PowerPoint® may not be the best presentation mechanism.

What did most of the students do? Exactly what the professor told them not to do: they created thoughtless PowerPoint® presentations and robotically recited all of the mundane details of the pre-designated subject matter. Needless to say they did not do well. These students were simply lead astray by the default PowerPoint® presentation method: reporting and recounting of information. PowerPoint® is not an innately interactive tool unless it is done so explicitly by the presenter himself or herself, thus those students failed to meet the core requirement of interactivity in their team presentations.

PowerPoint® is not a Good Place to Begin a Presentation

As I pointed out in “The Proper Care and Planning of Presentations,” PowerPoint® is not a good place to begin planning a presentation – it can get you off on the wrong track and lead you towards reducing your complex ideas into meaningless lists of bullets, which is what happened to my classmates.

PowerPoint® is a great presentation tool when used properly but it’s not the solution for every single conceivable presentation need. There are some situations where PowerPoint® is simply not the right tool for the job.

Getting Away from PowerPoint®

When it came to be my turn to present I had my group do something that was “radical” in the eyes of my classmates – we did a presentation without PowerPoint® at all. The members of my group were initially resistant to the idea of abandoning PowerPoint® even though the tool had caused all of the other students in the class to fail. That’s how attached they were to the tool: they would use it even if it meant getting poor marks.

The decision to abandon PowerPoint® early on in our presentation planning process turned out to be a major blessing in disguise because it forced us to move outside of our comfort zone. Without the conformity of PowerPoint® we were able to come up with something really original – an interactive game with our audience where we had them determine how to arrive at the correct outcome given a hypothetical situation posed by our subject matter. It was an astonishing success and it was so good, in fact, that the rest of the groups of students in the class mindlessly copied and imitated our presentation from that point onward.

The lesson here is twofold:

PowerPoint® isn’t necessary to have a great presentation; it can certainly help when used properly, but it is by no means a requirement.
In many cases planning your presentation outside the confines and comfort of PowerPoint® can be an effective means to build an innovative, original presentation, even if you end up using PowerPoint® as your eventual presentation platform.

The point is that your universe as a presenter should not be limited to the just the scope of PowerPoint®, as PowerPoint® can be an inhibitor to creativity, rather than a catalyst.

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SmartDraw.com to Announce SmartDraw 2009’s Improved PowerPoint® Integration at PowerPoint® Live 2008

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:53:00 GMT

On September 21^st, 2008, SmartDraw.com will formally announce and demonstrate its improved PowerPoint® integration at Rick Altman’s PowerPoint® Live 2008 conference, which is being held here in our home town of San Diego, California. Rick Altman has authored a number of well-received guest articles for Working Smarter in the past and is recognized as one of the leading authorities on good presentation design worldwide. He’s also the author of Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck.

“SmartDraw is very good at creating charts, graphs, forms and diagrams, and even better at integrating [those graphics] into a presentation. I am flattered that SmartDraw has chosen our conference to announce the software’s newest presentation features” – Rick Altman.

At some point next week, we are going to try to put up some video of the proceedings at the conference. But for those of you who are interested in what we’re going to be showcasing, here’s a quick list of the specific features that we will be demonstrating:

Animation of Charts and Graphs
Unique PowerPoint® Integration
Charts & Graphs with 3D Effects
Live Maps with Regional Data
3D Perspective Effects (also known as the “flying carpet” layout)

Throughout the week we are going to continue posting additional presentation-related content. Feel free to subscribe to Working Smarter if you want to stay tuned!

Sample PowerPoint® Presentation: U.S. Election - Battleground States by the Numbers

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:59:00 GMT

If you watched our previous two screencasts, one where we contrasted poor presentation techniques with the sequenced presentation approach and one where we showed you how to build sequenced PowerPoint® presentations using SmartDraw 2009, then you might be asking yourself "so what does a good presentation look like from start to finish using these techniques?"

In today's screencast, "U.S. Election 2008: The Battleground States by the Numbers," we show you just that - a full PowerPoint® presentation from start to finish which incorporates sequenced visuals built using SmartDraw 2009. You can watch the presentation in video format below:

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

If you liked the animated charts that you saw in this presentation the please download a free trial of SmartDraw 2009 and check out our improved PowerPoint® integration features.

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Screencast: Building Sequenced Charts in PowerPoint® Using SmartDraw 2009

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:23:00 GMT

As a follow-up to yesterday's screencast where we demonstrated the difference between the sequenced presentation approach and Death by PowerPoint® we'd like to show you how we actually produced that presentation using SmartDraw 2009. So it is our pleasure to present to you our second screencast this week (there will be a third on Thursday), "Building Sequenced Charts in PowerPoint® Using SmartDraw 2009." Please watch the video below:

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

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Screencast: Contrasting Sequencing with Death by PowerPoint®

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 05:51:00 GMT

Over the past few days we have made the case for using animation in your PowerPoint® presentations, and today we intend to reinforce our argument with a powerful illustration. In today's screencast we are going to compare and contrast "Death by PowerPoint®," "Data Dumping," and presentations that use sequencing properly in order to underscore how effective good animation can be. It's our pleasure to present to you, "Contrasting Sequencing with Death by PowerPoint®:"

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

If you liked the animated charts that you saw in this presentation the please download a free trial of SmartDraw 2009 and check out our improved PowerPoint® integration features.

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The Case for Animation

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:07:00 GMT

Rick Altman said the following in an earlier guest post called “Thriving with Animation:”

“Animation might be single-handedly responsible for more PowerPoint® annoyance than all the other annoyances combined. Between Edward Tufte and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, PowerPoint animation is publicly flogged more often than our politicians are.

And at the same time, when done correctly, animation isn’t noticed at all. It’s not unlike being a major league baseball umpire, who gets no respect for doing a good job.”

How many times have you seen terrible PowerPoint® presentations that use those horrible fly-in animations along with the unbearable screeching tires sound effect? That’s not a presentation—that’s a disaster. The systematic misuse of PowerPoint’s capabilities along with the addiction to text-heavy slides has created a “Death by PowerPoint” endemic in offices around the world.

Where do Bad Presentations come from?

Making a good presentation isn’t easy. You have to put a lot of thought into what your message is, how you’re going to present it, what visuals you’re going to use, when you’re going to interact with the audience, and so forth. Most bad presentations come about because presenters do one of two things:

Take the path of least resistance. This is what leads to those awful slides with bullet after bullet, after bullet of solid text. Instead of creating a presentation, they end up creating oversized flash cards that they project onto a big screen and then dutifully read aloud to their audience. This is the sort of presentation that makes members of the audience wish they had remembered to sneak in copies of the Wall Street Journal—this way, they’d at least have something to help them avoid the gruesome onslaught of complete and total boredom brought on by the presenter’s lifeless, monotone drawl.
Try too hard. Presenters usually make this mistake only once—the first time they get behind the wheel of a big PowerPoint presentation, they decide to go all out and use every feature, every animation, every transition, and every sound effect. These presenters are probably thinking, “Wow, my audience will be impressed with the breadth of PowerPoint features that I’ve been able to weave into a single presentation. I’m sure this will be a presentation that they’ll remember!” The big day of the presentation arrives and what happens? The audience is so distracted by the tacky overuse of the aforementioned features that they don’t even remember what the presenter was presenting.

The Case for Using Animation Well

How do presenters reconcile these two alternatives? They can’t take the path of least resistance and they can’t try too hard either. The answer is to use a third alternative: use animation “wisely and appropriately.”

Animation is a powerful tool when used correctly, and as Rick Altman said, “when done correctly, it isn’t noticed at all.” Animation shouldn’t be part of the substance of your presentation, which is what the “try too hard” crowd gets wrong. Let me lay out the case for using animation:

Animation lets you present your ideas in a logical sequence when done correctly. I’m not referring to the top-down or left-to-right order in which they appear on the slides, I’m talking about the order in which you speak about your ideas in conjunction with the slides themselves. Animation keeps you paced and guarded—you only talk about the most recently revealed item to the audience through animation. By adhering to the sequence that you established when you were building your presentation, this effectively prevents you from wandering.

Animation helps your audience relate to an idea by focusing their attention on one point of order at a time. I have to present complex material, like marketing proposals, and it can be tough if I don’t use animation. I find that animation is a necessity because it keeps my audience focused on a single point at a time. It’s not that I am trying to constrain my audience to learn at my preferred pace; rather, it’s that using sequencing allows me to make sure, through interacting with my audience, that the audience as a whole is on the same page.

Yours truly needs to explain to my audience a number of nuances and details for each point. Rather than dump them on my audience with five times the information and in one fifth of the time, I move along at a measured pace. And I don’t transition to the next part of the sequence until I am certain that my audience is ready. Doing this with every major point of my presentation ensures that my audience will walk away with a complete understanding of the idea I am presenting.

Animation builds up your punch lines. If a good comedian were performing a standup routine using PowerPoint, would he or she reveal all the aspects of his or her jokes at the same time and ruin the punch line? Of course not—so why would you spoil your own “punch lines” by dumping everything onto your audience at once, instead of building them up? Good comedians work by slowly building their audience up to the punch line. They don’t robotically recite the joke from start to finish; they slow down where they need to; they go into more detail on key areas of the joke; they wait for the audience to catch up with them; and then finally, they hit the audience with the punch line. Animation helps you build up to your “big idea,” your punch line. And you’ll be able to deliver it more effectively after you’ve prepared your audience with the earlier stages of your sequenced presentation.

Don’t believe me? Go watch “PowerPoint Comedy” on YouTube and tell me that that presentation would have been just as effective without robust sequencing and animation.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to present more information about using animation correctly and we’re going to talk about how to use animation in SmartDraw 2009 (try it here,) so stay tuned.

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Announcing SmartDraw 2009 – Automatically Sequence SmartDraw Drawings in PowerPoint®

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:38:00 GMT

Normally we don’t focus an entire blog entrie on our product, SmartDraw. But given that we’ve officially released the newest version of SmartDraw today, I thought I might make an exception. Today we released SmartDraw 2009, which comes with a huge number of improvements to the software. Click here if you’d like to read about them in more detail.

There is one SmartDraw 2009 feature in particular that I’d like to discuss: our Smarter PowerPoint® Integration, because it relates directly to a number of the points that we’ve made about using animation to produce more effective PowerPoint® presentations.

What the Feature Does

SmartDraw 2009’s Smarter PowerPoint® Integration adds an entirely new dimension to SmartDraw’s PowerPoint® export capabilities: it allows you to “pre-animate” your SmartDraw drawings within SmartDraw before you export them to PowerPoint®.

You can animate any drawing in SmartDraw 2009 including floor plans, flow charts, org charts, Gantt charts, timelines and any other type of diagram with a few simple clicks of a button. It’s pretty easy.

How this Feature Benefits You

Rick Altman wrote a guest piece for us a while back called “Thriving with Animation,” in which he explained that animation, when used correctly, “isn’t noticed at all. It’s not unlike being a major league baseball umpire who gets no respect for doing a good job.” Putting large amounts of data on a slide and dumping it all at once onto your audience is not an effective technique for getting your point across; however, by using animation, you can sequence your data in a paced, measured fashion that keeps you and your audience on the same page.

It’s hard to appreciate how useful the feature is without seeing it; so if you look below, here is our brand new help video which demonstrates the feature and explains the payoffs concisely:

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

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